Claire Vaye Watkins wins Dylan Thomas Prize with 'Battleborn'

Carolyn Kellogg

California-born Claire Vaye Watkins has won the Wales-based Dylan Thomas Prize for "Battleborn." The international prize is designed to recognize a young author, is presented every other year and comes with a substantial award -- this year, more than $48,000.

The prize has a slightly delayed schedule. Watkins' book, her first, is a collection of short stories that was published in the U.S. in 2010. Since that time, the book has reaped a number of prizes: The Story Prize, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Watkins was born in Tecopa, Calif., a remote Mojave town; her father had moved there, perhaps, to escape the publicity attached to his time in the Manson Family (Paul Watkins didn't participate in the crimes). He died when Claire was 6; her mother remarried and they moved to Nevada, where she grew up poor and working-class.

"I didn't understand that you had to pay for college. I thought you got a bill at the end, like when you go to a restaurant," Watkins told The Times in 2010. She was the first in her family to attend college, and after her initial struggles decided to get an MFA in creative writing at Ohio State.

It was there that Watkins, now 29, began writing about the West of her youth. Some of those stories made it into "Battleborn," which takes its name from the unofficial Nevada state motto.

The BBC reported on the award ceremony, which took place Thursday in Swansea, Wales. "Claire Vaye Watkins has some of Dylan Thomas's extraordinary skill in the short story form of giving you a perfect vision of a complete world and that's extraordinarily rare," said Peter Florence, chairman of the judging panel.

The previous winners of the Dylan Thomas Prize are Rachel Trezise, Nam Le and Elyse Fenton.